The regime media’s ongoing meltdown over Joe Biden’s mental decline might be a bit of foreshadowing for what lies ahead in American society. What was on display the night of the debate is called a preference cascade. This is when people suddenly realize that their private doubts or preferences are shared by everyone else. One person realizes he is not alone in his doubts, for example, so he voices them and all of a sudden, this private doubt sweeps the room as public doubt.
Up to that point, everyone privately assumed that everyone else held an opinion or preference that was contrary to their private opinion or preference. This is preference falsification, which involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the privately held preference of the person. The person may disagree with what she perceives to be the collective opinion but she keeps this private. This is the underlying condition for the preference cascade.
Regarding Biden and the media, they were seeing what the world has been seeing for years, but they chose to keep quiet about it. One reason is pressure from the top of the media operations who collude with the political elites. The bigger reason is the herd mentality of regime media. The thing these people fear most is to be expelled from the system, so they invest most of their energy in making sure they never wander too far away from the rest of the herd.
On the night of the debate, as Biden stared into nothingness with his mouth open like a nursing home patient, the conflict between the privately held opinion of Biden’s condition and official opinion grew so large some people snapped. This is what set off the chain reaction we saw that night. All of a sudden, the poles have reversed and those who doubt that it is a good idea to question Biden’s fitness keep quiet because they assume the herd holds a contrary opinion.
This is creating an enormous problem for Team Biden. They are going from one regime platform to the next hoping to pressure these people into abandoning the public position on Biden’s brain condition, but that same herd mentality is preventing them from changing opinions on the matter. They are now playing the race card against regime media, with the Congressional Black Caucus leading the charge. Questioning Biden’s fitness is now the new racism.
What the regime is slamming into is a problem of their own making. Decades of lies about the nature of the regime were made possible by manipulation of the public through the herd mentality of regime media. Note how the regime worked tirelessly to remove anyone from the media who questioned official narratives. The purge of diverse opinion from Fox News is the most recent example. The regime built a herd and now the herd has broken through the fence.
This may turn out to be a good analogy for society as a whole. The two-party system that emerged from the Cold War was built around a new consensus. The end of history was the triumph of Western democracy and by extension, the triumph of the managerial elite that came to control Western democracies. One party would promote a domestic agenda shepherded by the elites, while the other party would champion an international agenda that spread that domestic agenda globally.
The glue holding it together was both their confidence in their ability to remake the world, but also their shared belief that the general public was fully committed to what the elites now call democracy. For thirty years the public has been subjected to a firehose of propaganda about how “our democracy” works. You have to accept the results because it is the result of democracy and no one better question “our democracy” or you are worse than Hitler.
The truth is though, this process and slowly undermined public trust in the institutions associated with democracy. Only kooks and simpletons accept anything from regime media at face value. Most people think the political parties are corrupt. If not for Trump, the Republican Party would be facing the same fate as the Tories. Even the military has lost the trust of the public. Recruitment is in a crisis because the people who used to buy the flag waving no longer wave the flags of their fathers.
In other words, we have a condition similar to that which prevailed in the media with regards to Biden’s mental health. The gap between what people think privately about their political system and what they will state publicly is growing. Every fake news item about it, each dodgy election result and the increasing despair at daily life are widening that gap by undermining trust in the system. The conditions for a preference cascade are just about in place, waiting for the match.
Wild fires start because no one can easily predict which spark at which location will set the woods ablaze. The solution is to prevent the conditions that can lead to a wildfire, rather than police the sparks. The regime has chosen the other path. They invest their time in preventing sparks. The reason regime media looks like a zombie horde is anyone with a spark of curiosity was forced to hide his own misgivings for fear of being ostracized, but that just created the conditions for this media wildfire.
We see the same in the general public. In the fullness of time, we may look at this ongoing populist revolt as a genuine defense of the system by the public because they still believed in the system. The real peasant revolt that comes next will start with the preference cascade when everyone all at once realizes that everyone else detests their rulers and the system that makes them possible. History says these sorts of wildfires end only one way.
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